prize winner

*
For the eeriest poetry post of the day, see this:

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2011/02/poetry_review_the_illiterate_b.html

Maybe Biespiel isn't being disingenuous about Meredith, maybe he really admires him—well!

Meredith was the PoBiz equivalent of a figure you often see in politics:

a mediocre rich guy who buys his way into favor, onto boards and committees,

and through decades of backroom deals and bribes and kickbacks and collecting IOUs

finally weasels his way up the ladder, a "pol" who gets his pay-off in the form of

a cabinet post or an ambassadorship or the governor's mansion,

i.e. the PolBiz equivalent of the Pulitzer, NBA, etc.

Meredith: just another Ivyleague richguy poet like all the other IV-richguy poets whose oh so prestigious work is deepsixed six months after they die. (Howard Moss et al.)

*
Hey, all you Pulitzer Prize poets, you National Book Award-winning poets, you Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, all you Yale Younger poets, aren't you proud to share those honors with him, with William Meredith? —Because he copped every one of them: he won the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award, and he was a Chancellor of AAP, and he was a Yale Younger poet!


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uh hunh

*
A lot of poetry readers are snobs who will only read verse which bears the imprimatur of establishment venues.

Living as I do on a Social Security budget, I can't afford to place advertisements for my books in prestigious periodicals like American Poetry Review or Fence or the Yale Review et al.

Hence most of the poetry-reading public doesn't even know that my books exist and that they can be downloaded free as PDFs and/or bought inexpensively in paperback editions (I always set my "profit" at zero when I prep the books).

Many poets have websites or blogs where they promote their own mostly deadtree publications and those of their friends, but few if any of these poets ever mention the availability of my "vanity" volumes because my publishing activity constitutes a threat to the economy of their supposedly legitimate practice.

I think a lot of poets are really angry at me for giving my books away free, and that they engage in a conspiracy of silence regarding my publications.

And of course, none of my available-for-free books has ever been reviewed (or even listed, for that matter) by any online webzine or poetry site. They pretend I don't exist.

And who knows, maybe they're right. If nobody notes that my books exist, then I guess they don't exist.

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*

*
The world of Art mirrors the world of Society. Just as the latter is based on hierarchy, on a class system, so is the former.

And in the world of Art, poetry is the lowest class.

In the world of Art, poets are the proles, the slaves.

Just as slaves in the world of Society are bullied and beaten, treated as subhuman, so in the world of Art poets are similarly abused.

All the wealth/value produced by Society's slaves is stolen from them by those in the higher classes. The latter grow rich on the former's misery.

Every idea or good generated by poet-labor is also stolen, plagiarized by the higher classes of Music, Painting, Film and Prose.

They prosper on the poet's back.

All their wealth comes from stealing and using what the poet-slave produces.

*
As slaves, poets internalize their inferior status. We grovel before the Masters of Music Painting Film and Prose. We become their lickspittles, their toadies, their dogs, obsequiously grateful for the least crumb falling from their fat tables.

We flatter kiss-ass praise these Masters for their greatness, forgetting that every good every gram of worth they possess, every virtue, was stolen from us.

*
From time to time the slaves of Society have risen up against their evil Masters, have rebelled against their oppressors.

But the slaves of Art, the poets, have they ever revolted against their oppressive Masters?

Never.

We have never protested against the Prosewriters the Filmmakers the Musicmucks the Painters, the Masters who daily steal our resources, we have never tried to expose their criminal acts of theft and exploitation.

No, we never even dream of rising up in fury to confront and attack these overlords whose cabals conspire against our welfare,

whose cultural institutions and media are designed and operated to keep us in penury and abject submission.

Whose statutes of power stand ready to cripple and punish and murder us.

As they have done so often.

//

rhymes with Pater

*
it's quite simple, really:

the most important art should receive the most funding—

poetry is the most important art, ergo

most of the money which society misdirectedly grants to music/painting/etc

should be given to poets instead.

If you're a poet and you don't believe that poetry is the most important art,

then you're a traitor—

...

george washington he big he trade my mother for a pig

*
I don't hate music,

but it infuriates me that societies of all sorts

underfund poetry so drastically, especially when

compared to the financial support they lavish on music—

and it seems to me there is a reason this disproportionate

ratio occurs:

of course the power elites of those societies control all budgetary
decisions regarding arts funding,

and when they starve poetry while stuffing music with that munificent
paltry pittance of the national pork they grudgingly allot the various arts,

they know what they're doing. The biggies/oligarchs of every
country know

that music can always be manipulated to prop up their evil
purposes,

that symphonic snobsters and egomane popstars can always
be used to quell the mob and lull the populace via beautifully staged

reenactments of the status quo:—

they know music's part of their team. They count on music to
help enforce their tyranny. That's why

our last President, George W. Bush's feelings were so hurt by Kanye West's
harsh words:

he was being betrayed by a member of his staff.

If Prez GWB had learned of the dischordant notes being produced
during his reign by Joshua Clover (not to mention you),

would he have been similarly distressed?

Poetry doesn't get any funding (in comparison to music, poetry's
purse is empty)

for the simple logic that poetry opposes the oppressive policies of the rulers

who dole out

that gelt, that graft.

***

and it burns burns burns that ring o' fire

*
all you intells who wanna characterize billionaire Bob Dylan and his fellow wealthy plutocrat tunesmiths

as poets,

go ahead, I don't care, I have no interest in establishing hierarchies boundaries of who's
a poet and who's a what,—

but if the billionaire Zimmerman is a poet,

then where's James Tate's Grammy—

where's the Rolling Stone cover stories on Gluck/Olds/et al—

where's John Ashbery's Kennedy Center Presidential Honors Medal?

?

With music and poetry, it's a one way street.

And guess who's always getting run over on it.

**

more on new thingism (cont. from previous post)

*
I don't have the exact quote, but somewhere Alfred Hitchcock said something to the effect that

critics who complained about the trivial or tawdry low-brow content of his films were like a museum-goer wondering whether Cezanne's apples were sweet or sour.

They miss the point, he insisted. It's not content that's important, it's style.

Any old apple or wheelbarrow or pistol poking out of a pocket will do for a subject.

Content is irrelevant, or should be, according to this theory:

the viewer or reader must focus first and foremost on the artist's stylistic choices and methods.

Indeed, the audience is commanded to believe that

WHAT the artist says or shows is secondary to HOW he or she does it.

As John Ciardi summarises the theory in his 1958 book 'How Does a Poem Mean,'

"Anything significantly looked at is significant."

In fact, in this dispensation, in this scale of esthetics, the more insignificant the ostensible subject is, the better.

Objectivist poetry (and much of Imagist) is based on this tenet.

Reznikoff: 'About an excavation a flock of bright red lanterns has settled.' (This example comes from the canonical Norton Modern Anthol.)

What makes this a poem? (And not merely a poem: no, it's now a Work of Literature, due to its enshrinement in the Norton)—

Maybe the linebreaks, for a start. I've deliberately left them out, in honor of all the 'prose poems' being written currently—

And then of course the metaphor: the lanterns are no longer lanterns per se, they're seen as a "flock" of "settl[ing]" birds.

Does this metaphorical overlay make it poetry? (I assume the comparison is deliberately clicheish—I mean, birds?)

The subject/object being depicted is ordinary, everyday, banal, something you've seen many times, especially in urban areas:

a hole, a trench has been dug, an "excavation", presumably for the usual purposes: to lay or repair waterpipes, electrical grids, etc. Installing cables. And then when the workers quit for the day, they leave lanterns, flashing lights, signs and sawhorses around the open pit, as warnings to protect pedestrians/motorists from straying into it—

About an excavation
a flock of bright red lanterns
has settled.

"Anything significantly looked at is significant," lectures John Ciardi, who insists that "How" a poem means is more important that "What" it means—

but is it? I wonder. I think this may be an idea (an ideal, really) whose time has passed.

This belief—that the content of a poem is irrelevant,

that poets are free to seize upon any trivial object, any thingy-thing-thing in the environment around them,

and then, through the power of their craft and the manipulations of their genius,

can transform that common thing, that wheelbarrow or street-flasher or this:

"Between walls (the back wings of the hospital) where nothing will grow lie cinders in which shine the broken pieces of a green bottle."

What makes this poetry? I've left out the linebreaks.

If you saw this described in a scene in a novel—
you know, something like: "During lunchbreak Dr. Wayben stepped out for a cigarette in the area back of the surgical and ER wings and noticed down among the cinder gravel back there where grass never grew, some pieces of a broken green bottle; he wondered for a moment if it was a medicine or a wine bottle: either one, its shards gleamed up eagerly and desperately as his dying patient Julia Roach's eyes, smashed apart down there in the bleak shadows cast by the clinic blocks that towered behind him as he stood puffing. . . ." etc. etc.—

If you read it in a novel—and such intentionalized observations and characterizational metaphors abound in most fiction—it would just be another paragraph in the narrative . . .

But isolate that sight, that glimpse of glass in the dark gravel, chop that observation up into abrupt lines and stanzas, and presto it's poetry?

In this "Objectivist" mode the worse your subject matter is, the more trivial tawdry and ordinary it is, the better it is—

*
It's the arrogance of this theory which I find most offensive.

The Objectivist poet is in effect saying to their audience:

"Yes yes, I know you want poems about Important Significant Events Subjects,

but if I were to give in and give you such poems, you would focus your interest more upon those ISES

and less upon me!—

Distracted by that salient content, you might ignore and or insuffiently appreciate me, my artistry—

Look: here, I take this old wheelbarrow, this common roadside lantern, these unnoticed pieces of broken glass in the gravel,

or any trivial everyday phenomenon, any household object,

and lo, behold, even these mere nothing-things, these disposable sights and signs,

even the humblest is elevated by my craft my skill my genius

into the realm of art!

I take this mud and godlike transform it into gold.

And moreover, worse fate of all, if I gave you the poems you want, you might worship them instead of me."

—The Objectivist/NewThingypoo poet takes their credo from number one on the big 10 list: thou shalt have no other gods before me.


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